Okay, what's with this new "Addresses" control panel under "Mail"? I don't like it at all. I used to be able to create a new address and select what mailbox I wanted it to go to. Now I have no idea where the mail is going. I think the user interface of it is horribly designed.

Oh, good, I'm not the only one. I thought something was messed up in my control panel and I had no idea how to fix it. I'm new to DH, so the mxxx names were confusing to me. It would be nice if they're going away.

A bit of a surprise to me as well as I just went to setup a new mailbox and couldn't find that option. Ardco seems correct, however. We still have the same options*, it's just simplified. I just setup a new mailbox. we still have mboxes, you just get the number on the confirmation page.

*Looks like we no longer have the option to have our email not archived? I hope that's just a mistake. If a bunch of email on my main imap account suddenly goes missing...

I have a bunch of aliases set up, and they still show in the 'addresses' tab - but with no information as to what mailbox they deliver to.

If I try and edit one of those aliases, I have no 'real' (Mxxxxxx) mailboxes to choose from.And nowhere in my control panel can I list my POP3 boxes for any of my domains - except through the 'mailboxes.daomin.com' interface...

I mentioned something about this in another post (don't have an exact link). There is progress being made in this direction, and this is an early step. It's designed to make more sense, but feel free to report any bugs to support. I imagine Josh (who made the changes) will have a look at this thread too.

But it's weird that they took this away from the Panel - I want it back. It was really handy. As an admin, one should be able to control these things from the Panel as usual, not having to log into another URL for every mailbox. Imagine doing a policy change on 50+ mailboxes?

As a first step towards being able to let users log in as user@domain.com instead of just m#######, we're changing the way our alias system works a bit.

Basically, starting last night, there is now a 1to1 mapping between mailboxes and email addresses. This is so when somebody logs in as user@domain.com in the future, we can figure out immediately exactly which mailbox they meant. Fortunately, although this seems like a restriction of features, it won't actually result in any less functionality, because email addresses can still forward to multiple email addresses (even though they can only go to at most one DreamHost mailbox).

So, let's say before you had a@a.com and b@b.com both going to mailbox m123. Now, a@a.com will still go to m123, but b@b.com will just forward to a@a.com. Everything still works the same, but now we know that m123 <=> a@a.com.

To go with this change, and in preparation for the new user@domain.com paradigm, there's that new Addresses tab in our web panel, and no more old Mailboxes tab. Also, we're running a script right now that's going through all hundreds of thousands of aliases and mailboxes and smartily redoing the maps like in the example above!

That's where the little problems are you're talking about are coming up.. I didn't realize it would take over 48 hours for this script to complete (it should be done by tomorrow around 5pm Pacific)! So for a little while, some people aren't seeing the mailbox that their email addresses are tied to.

I planned to do the switch to the new tab right as the script switched all the data over, but that's kinda hard when the script runs for two days! So it was decided to do the switch of the panel first.. or else we'd have to re-run the script afterwards because more users would be set up incorrectly during the running.

At this point, I think most of your users actually should be switched over (it's working from most recent to oldest).. so please check out the panel again and see if things still make no sense! If they're still messed up, if possible try waiting until Wednesday morning and check again.. if they're still messed up then, something is definitely awry.. please contact suppot@dreamhost.com about it!

Also, about the mailbox rotation, I had thought we'd actually already made that required, but it looks like not! I'll see about switching it back..

Hope this all makes sense and I really appreciate your understanding during the transition!

josh, i appreciate all the work you guys are doing in trying to get ride of the m123456 usernames but the entire admin 'address' panel makes absolutely no sense. is it that difficult to send an email out to your customers explaining to them what's going on? i wasted a lot of time this morning trying to understand the new user interface and it still makes no sense to me. i clicked on 'edit' for on of my accounts and when i hit save changes it kept telling me that the password fields were blank yet i wasn't trying to change the password. so i typed in the current password and after i hit save changes it created an ENTIRELY new username for the email account. previously the email went to the same username for the actual user i had set up, now it's going to one of the m123456 accounts. i didn't hit set up a new account or ask it to set up a new account.

what's going on? why would you do a major change like this and not tell your customers.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature. Previously, if a web panel user had Privilege Administration set to "No," they were not able to create new mailboxes. Now they are. Additionally, I no longer see anything that shows the user how many mailboxes they have used. Seems strange DH would try to force a limit on inbox size but allow unlimited mailboxes, so I'm guessing this is a bug.

Ack, again, I'm really sorry about the problems! I think just about everything you described was because your data hadn't been updated yet by the script running. I think if you go back now, things may be a bit clearer all around and work better?

The script's not done running but I added some hacks so things should still work okay while it goes!

Hey snokarver,

Ah yeah, that is a bug about the privileges being missing. I'll go back in and sort out everything with number of mailboxes used, who can add them, and figure out the deal with required mailbox rotation by tomorrow!

i'm trying to create a new email alias to forward to an existing user that has already been set up and i there is nowhere to do that. previously there was a scroll box that listed all the current users to select from but there is nothing like that on the new 'create a new address' page.

the only option it says is "Mailbox Login: will be generated upon submission"

i don't want it to be generated upon submission, i just want the address to forward to an existing mailbox but that option is not there.

hey josh... i am trying to have an address drop mail into an existing mailbox. the admin gives the impression that i put the "real name" of the mailbox in field labeled "Mailbox 'name'", however when i enter either the real name of an existing mailbox or the m### id of the mailbox, the admin always creates a new mailbox for the address.